Themed Section Gender/Sexuality/Italy 5 (2018) Cybermoms and Postfeminism in Italian Web Series GIOVANNA FALESCHINI LERNER
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
http://www.gendersexualityitaly.com g/s/i is an annual peer-reviewed journal which publishes research on gendered identities and the ways they intersect with and produce Italian politics, culture, and society by way of a variety of cultural productions, discourses, and practices spanning historical, social, and geopolitical boundaries. Title: Cybermoms and Postfeminism in Italian Web Series Journal Issue: gender/sexuality/italy, 5 (2018) Author: Giovanna Faleschini Lerner Publication date: August 2018 Publication info: gender/sexuality/italy, “Themed Section” Permalink: http://www.gendersexualityitaly.com/7-cybermoms-and-postfeminism-in-italian-web-series/ Author Bio: Giovanna Faleschini Lerner is Associate Professor of Italian at Franklin & Marshall College, where she contributes to the program in Comparative Literary Studies and chairs the program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research interests include the relationship between literature and cinema and the visual arts, film and media studies, motherhood studies, and Mediterranean and migration studies. She is the author of The Painter as Writer: Carlo Levi’s Visual Poetics (Palgrave Macmillan 2012), and the co- editor, with Maria Elena D’Amelio, of Italian Motherhood on Screen (Palgrave Macmillan 2017). Her articles on twentieth-century and contemporary Italian literature and cinema have appeared in Italica, Forum Italicum, Annali d’italianistica, California Italian Studies, Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, and Poetiche, and she has contributed essays to numerous scholarly edited volumes. Her current work focuses on the representation of the migrant experience in the cinema of Italy. Abstract: Journalist Loredana Lipperini astutely observes how in Italy “motherhood is the knot” in which are entangled different feminist philosophies, as well as patriarchal views of the maternal figure as the only acceptable version of female identity. In biopolitical terms, the maternal body is “the place where power expresses itself and where power, by assuming control of it, exercises its greatest repression (Lupperini 2007). This article aims to disentangle the “knot” of feminist aspirations and contradictory discourses on motherhood in contemporary Italy as it is explored in three Italian web series: Ivan Cotroneo’s Una mamma imperfetta (2013), Eva Milella’s and Elisa Giani’s Malamamma (2013), and Alessandra Bonzi’s Oh mamma mia (2015). Drawing on Italian, European, and North American feminist criticism, I demonstrate how, despite references to feminist discourses, these media narratives of motherhood cannot escape the pervasiveness of postfeminist neoliberal ideology, and ultimately confirm the power structures they aim to challenge or subvert. Though these series try to question the validity of postfeminist models of perfect motherhood, they remain deeply enmeshed in the same dynamics that have made them powerful and pervasive—thus displaying the tensions between conflicting ideals and realities that all imperfect mothers face in their daily lives. Key Words: motherhood, postfeminism, web series, cyberfeminism, neoliberalism. Copyright information g/s/i is published online and is an open-access journal. All content, including multimedia files, is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution and is published according to the Creative Commons License, which does not allow commercial use of published work or its manipulation in derivative forms. Content can be downloaded and cited as specified by the author/s. However, the Editorial Board recommends providing the link to the article (not sharing the PDF) so that the author/s can receive credit for each access to his/her work, which is only published online. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License Themed Section gender/sexuality/italy 5 (2018) Cybermoms and Postfeminism in Italian Web Series GIOVANNA FALESCHINI LERNER In a New York Times article published in March 1994, journalist Rosalind Resnick defined herself as a “cyber-mom,” appropriating the term with which her friends and family jokingly referred to her ever since she had begun immersing herself in the world of internet connectivity. In describing her motivations for spending time online, she mentioned on the one hand the convenience of having the tools for communication, news research, and household management at her fingertips, on the other the sense of community that the internet afforded her as a new mother who had left her job to work from home as a free-lancer.1 Resnick’s story emphasizes the potential of the early internet to provide women with “a network of lines on which to chatter, natter, work and play,” as Sadie Plant, a pioneer of cyberfeminism, would write a few years later, but it also reveals the imbrication of technology and postfeminist discourses on motherhood and choice.2 This article aims to explore the complex nexus of cyberfeminism and postfeminism that emerges in Italian web-based narrative representations of motherhood, and specifically three web series with very different production styles, audiences, and platforms: Ivan Cotroneo’s Una mamma imperfetta / Imperfect Mom (2013), Eva Milella’s and Elisa Giani’s Malamamma (Badmom), and Swiss-Italian journalist Alessandra Bonzi’s Oh mamma mia (2015). The analysis of these three case studies will show how, despite aesthetic and rhetorical echoes of cyberfeminist discourses, web-based narrative forms can hardly escape the pervasiveness of postfeminist neoliberal ideology, and ultimately confirm the power structures they set out to challenge or even subvert. It is important to recognize and engage critically with this tension, insofar as, as Alessandra Gribaldo and Giovanna Zapperi have written, media have the power to produce “effetti di realtà e […] un forte potere di colonizzazione dell’immaginario e delle aspirazioni femminili” (reality effects, and […] a great power of colonizing women’s imaginary and aspirations).3 Cyberfeminism and the Maternal The emergence of cyberfeminism is usually traced back to feminist biologist and posthumanist critic Donna Haraway’s 1985 “Cyborg Manifesto.”4 With the publication of Haraway’s essay, many feminist thinkers and scholars embraced the possibilities afforded by emerging Internet technologies as tools 1 Rosalind Resnick, “Watch Out Nerds, Here’s Cybermom,” The New York Times, 16 March 1994, n.p. 2 Sadie Plant, “On the Matrix. Cyberfeminist Simulations” (1996), rptd. in The Cybercultures Reader, eds. David Bell and Barbara Kennedy (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 235. Though other terms have recently partially supplanted “cyberfeminism” (for example “networked feminism”, or even “post-cyber feminism,” as documented in the 2017 Institute of Contemporary Art Post-Cyber Feminist International Conference in London), I use it here to highlight the historical connections between the media strategies I explore and these earlier movements. Post-cyber feminists themselves do not see their position as opposed or beyond the goals of cyberfeminism, but use the prefix “post-” to define their positionality as no longer aspiring to a cyber future, but as living in it. (Hettie Judah, “Ungender, deprogram, urinate: improve your life with post-cyber international feminism!” The Guardian, 24 November 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/nov/24/ica-ungender- deprogram-urinate-how-post-cyber-international-feminism-can-improve-your-life. Web. Accessed 25 July 2018. 3 Alessandra Gribaldo and Giovanna Zapperi, Lo schermo del potere. Femminismo e regime della visibilità. Verona: Ombre Corte, 2012, 14, my translation. 4 Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” Socialist Review 15, no. 2 (1985): 65-107, rptd. as “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth-Century,” in Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association, 1991), 149-181. Themed Section gender/sexuality/italy 5 (2018) GIOVANNA FALESCHINI LERNER | 143 of subversive resistance against suppressive gender regimes.5 Digital technologies were seen as enabling “women to engage in new forms of contestation and in proactive endeavors in multiple different realms, from political to economic.”6 The term “cyberfeminism” itself is analogous to the multiplicity of the internet and, from the outset, it included a vast range of discourses, theories, and practices about the relationship between gender and digital technologies. It was coined by Plant in the 1990s, almost simultaneously with the Australian art collective VNS Matrix. Plant argued that, [C]omplex systems and virtual worlds are not only important because they open spaces for existing women within an already existing culture, but also because of the extent to which they undermine both the world-view and the material reality of two thousand years of patriarchal control.7 Similarly, VNS Matrix presented its collective project as “the virus of the new world disorder / rupturing the symbolic from within / saboteurs of big daddy mainframe.”8 The interest in cyberfeminist practices was initially connected to the disembodied nature of digital agency, which was seen as potentially liberating from the discriminatory realities of embodied experience.9 Some feminists were particularly attracted to the possibilities of “[g]ender bending, online activism and connectivity.”10 As Plant wrote at the time, cyberfeminism was a distributed